Author: Smart City Memphis

It seems the perfect time to revisit two ideas about downtown streets that deserve new life.One deals with Fourth Street from Union to Beale and the second is Main Street, which is neither main nor a street.During the design of...

What do you do with a gritty city lagging in economic growth and with a decades-old music heritage as its main claim to fame?No, not that one. We’re talking about Liverpool, England.If we were in charge of putting together a...

Poor Dan Ward. Surely the suggestion that the interim Memphis City Schools superintendent should appear on Bill O’Reilly’s national cable show was groupthink gone terribly awry.Surely, nobody in the Memphis City Schools...

State Rep. Ulysses Jones must have been frightened by sunshine while he was in his crib.Only a childhood trauma could have given him such an obsession in eroding the transparency and openness of government with his amendments to...

It’s always interesting compare the hyperbole about Beale Street with the reality of Beale Street.In a recent article in The Commercial Appeal about new security on the street, this statement jumped off the page. It was made by...

In time, we suspect that the controversy over the growing payroll in City Hall will be tempest in a teapot.A week ago, Memphis City Council members cross-examined Memphis Chief Administrative Officer Keith McGee about a budget...

The Tennessee Legislature is flirting with the idea of toll roads to fill the gap in road funding.We cast our vote for Highway 385.It’s the most expensive gift ever given in this county to developers and to sprawl, and it’s time...

Finally, a City Council member suggested the obvious: tenants for Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium should help pay for the $7.6 million in upgrades that they will benefit from.Savvy Council member Jim Strickland, after listening to...

Some opponents of the Beale Street Landing project – which is vitally needed to reinvigorate a riverfront ready for embalming – have recently taken to asking how Memphis City Council can justify spending $29 million on the...

We’d feel better about our public tax money being funneled to a private college – Lemoyne-Owen College – if we were getting some signals that it’s making the kinds of strides that will set it on a new financial and...